No More Learning

Amid these
perplexities, it was disquieting to learn that 'Unitarianism is becoming
very prevalent in Boston'. He inquired anxiously as to its 'complexion'
there; but received no very illuminating answer. The whole matter
continued to be wrapped in a painful obscurity, There were, he believed,
Unitarians and Unitarians; and he could say no more.

In the meantime, pending the completion of his great work, he occupied
himself with putting forward various suggestions of a practical kind. He
advocated the restoration of the Order of Deacons, which, he observed,
had long been 'quoad the reality, dead; for he believed that 'some plan
of this sort might be the small end of the wedge, by which Antichrist
might hereafter be burst asunder like the Dragon of Bel's temple'. But
the Order of Deacons was never restored, and Dr. Arnold turned his
attention elsewhere, urging in a weighty pamphlet the desirabitity of
authorising military officers, in congregations where it was impossible
to procure the presence of clergy, to administer the Eucharist, as well
as Baptism. It was with the object of laying such views as these before
the public--'to tell them plainly', as he said, 'the evils that exist,
and lead them, if I can, to their causes and remedies'--that he started,
in 1831, a weekly newspaper, "The Englishman's Register". The paper was
not a success, in spite of the fact that it set out to improve its
readers morally and, that it preserved, in every article, an avowedly
Christian tone. After a few weeks, and after he had spent upon it more
than L200, it came to an end.

Altogether, the prospect was decidedly discouraging. After all his
efforts, the absolute identity of Church and State remained as
unrecognised as ever.

'So deep', he was at last obliged to confess, 'is the distinction
between the Church and the State seated in our laws, our language, and
our very notions, that nothing less than a miraculous interposition of
God's Providence seems capable of eradicating it. '

Dr. Arnold waited in vain.

But, he did not wait in idleness. He attacked the same question from
another side: he explored the writings of the Christian Fathers, and
began to compose a commentary on the New Testament. In his view, the
Scriptures were as fit a subject as any other book for free inquiry and
the exercise of the individual judgment, and it was in this spirit that
he set about the interpretation of them. He was not afraid of facing
apparent difficulties, of admitting inconsistencies, or even errors, in
the sacred text. Thus he observed that 'in Chronicles xi, 20 and xiii,
2, there is a decided difference in the parentage of Abijah's
mother;'--'which', he added, 'is curious on any supposition'. And at one
time he had serious doubts as to the authorship of the Epistle to the
Hebrews. But he was able, on various problematical points, to suggest
interesting solutions.

At first, for instance, he could not but be startled by the cessation of
miracles in the early Church; but upon consideration, he came to the
conclusion that this phenomenon might be 'truly accounted for by the
supposition that none but the Apostles ever conferred miraculous powers,
and that therefore they ceased of course, after one generation'. Nor did
he fail to base his exegesis, whenever possible, upon an appeal to
general principles. One of his admirers points out how Dr. Arnold

'vindicated God's command to Abraham to sacrifice his son and to the
Jews to exterminate the nations of Canaan', by explaining the principles
on which these commands were given, and their reference to the moral
state of those to whom they were addressed--thereby educing light out of
darkness, unravelling the thread of God's religious education of the
human race, and holding up God's marvellous counsels to the devout
wonder and meditation of the thoughtful believer'.

There was one of his friends, however, who did not share this admiration
for the Doctor's methods of Scriptural interpretation. W. G. Ward, while
still a young man at Oxford, had come under his influence, and had been
for some time one of his most enthusiastic disciples. But the star of
Newman was rising at the University; Ward soon felt the attraction of
that magnetic power; and his belief in his old teacher began to waver.
It was, in particular, Dr. Arnold's treatment of the Scriptures which
filled Ward's argumentative mind, at first with distrust, and at last
with positive antagonism. To subject the Bible to free inquiry, to
exercise upon it the criticism of the individual judgment--where might
not such methods lead? Who could say that they would not end in
Socinianism? --nay, in Atheism itself? If the text of Scripture was to be
submitted to the searchings of human reason, how could the question of
its inspiration escape the same tribunal? And the proofs of revelation,
and even of the existence of God? What human faculty was capable of
deciding upon such enormous questions? And would not the logical result
be a condition of universal doubt?

'On a very moderate computation, Ward argued, 'five times the amount of
a man's natural life might qualify a person endowed with extraordinary
genius to have some faint notion (though even this we doubt) on which
side truth lies. ' It was not that he had the slightest doubt of Dr.
Arnold's orthodoxy--Dr. Arnold, whose piety was universally
recognised--Dr. Arnold, who had held up to scorn and execration
Strauss's Leben Jesu without reading it. What Ward complained of was the
Doctor's lack of logic, not his lack of faith. Could he not see that if
he really carried out his own principles to a logical conclusion he
would eventually find himself, precisely, in the arms of Strauss? The
young man, whose personal friendship remained unshaken, determined upon
an interview, and went down to Rugby primed with first principles,
syllogisms, and dilemmas. Finding that the headmaster was busy in
school, he spent the afternoon reading novels on the sofa in the
drawing-room. When at last, late in the evening, the Doctor returned,
tired out with his day's work, Ward fell upon him with all his vigour.
The contest was long and furious; it was also entirely inconclusive.
When it was over, Ward, with none of his brilliant arguments disposed
of, and none of his probing questions satisfactorily answered, returned
to the University to plunge headlong into the vortex of the Oxford
Movement; and Dr. Arnold, worried, perplexed, and exhausted, went to
bed, where he remained for the next thirty-six hours.

The Commentary on the New Testament was never finished, and the great
work on Church and State itself remained a fragment. Dr. Arnold's active
mind was diverted from political and theological speculations to the
study of philology, and to historical composition. His Roman History,
which he regarded as 'the chief monument of his historical fame', was
based partly upon the researches of Niebuhr, and partly upon an aversion
to Gibbon.

'My highest ambition,' he wrote, 'is to make my history the very reverse
of Gibbon in this respect, that whereas the whole spirit of his work,
from its low morality, is hostile to religion, without speaking directly
against it, so my greatest desire would be, in my History, by its high
morals and its general tone, to be of use to the cause without actually
bringing it forward. '

These efforts were rewarded, in 1841, by the Professorship of Modern
History at Oxford. Meanwhile, he was engaged in the study of the
Sanskrit and Slavonic languages, bringing out an elaborate edition of
Thucydides, and carrying on a voluminous correspondence upon a multitude
of topics with a large circle of men of learning. At his death, his
published works, composed during such intervals as he could spare from
the management of a great public school, filled, besides a large number
of pamphlets and articles, no less than seventeen volumes. It was no
wonder that Carlyle, after a visit to Rugby, should have characterised
Dr. Arnold as a man of 'unhasting, unresting diligence'.

Mrs. Arnold, too, no doubt agreed with Carlyle. During the first eight
years of their married life, she bore him six children; and four more
were to follow. In this large and growing domestic circle his hours of
relaxation were spent. There those who had only known him in his
professional capacity were surprised to find him displaying the
tenderness and jocosity of a parent. The dignified and stern headmaster
was actually seen to dandle infants and to caracole upon the hearthrug
on all fours. Yet, we are told, 'the sense of his authority as a father
was never lost in his playfulness as a companion'. On more serious
occasions, the voice of the spiritual teacher sometimes made itself
heard. An intimate friend described how 'on a comparison having been
made in his family circle, which seemed to place St. Paul above St.
John,' the tears rushed to the Doctor's eyes and how, repeating one of
the verses from St. John, he begged that the comparison might never
again be made. The longer holidays were spent in Westmorland, where,
rambling with his offspring among the mountains, gathering wild flowers,
and pointing out the beauties of Nature, Dr. Arnold enjoyed, as he
himself would often say, 'an almost awful happiness'. Music he did not
appreciate, though he occasionally desired his eldest boy, Matthew, to
sing him the Confirmation Hymn of Dr. Hinds, to which he had become
endeared, owing to its use in Rugby Chapel. But his lack of ear was, he
considered, amply recompensed by his love of flowers: 'they are my
music,' he declared. Yet, in such a matter, he was careful to refrain
from an excess of feeling, such as, in his opinion, marked the famous
lines of Wordsworth:

'To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. '

He found the sentiment morbid. 'Life,' he said, 'is not long enough to
take such intense interest in objects in themselves so little. ' As for
the animal world, his feelings towards it were of a very different cast.
'The whole subject,' he said, 'of the brute creation is to me one of
such painful mystery, that I dare not approach it. ' The Unitarians
themselves were a less distressing thought.

Once or twice he found time to visit the Continent, and the letters and
journals recording in minute detail his reflections and impressions in
France or Italy show us that Dr. Arnold preserved, in spite of the
distractions of foreign scenes and foreign manners, his accustomed
habits of mind. Taking very little interest in works of art, he was
occasionally moved by the beauty of natural objects; but his principal
preoccupation remained with the moral aspects of things. From this point
of view, he found much to reprehend in the conduct of his own
countrymen. 'I fear,' he wrote, 'that our countrymen who live abroad are
not in the best possible moral state, however much they may do in
science or literature. ' And this was unfortunate, because 'a thorough
English gentleman--Christian, manly, and enlightened--is more, I
believe, than Guizot or Sismondi could comprehend; it is a finer
specimen of human nature than any other country, I believe, could
furnish'. Nevertheless, our travellers would imitate foreign customs
without discrimination, 'as in the absurd habit of not eating fish with
a knife, borrowed from the French, who do it because they have no knives
fit for use'. Places, no less than people, aroused similar reflections.
By Pompeii, Dr. Arnold was not particularly impressed.

'There is only,' he observed, 'the same sort of interest with which one
would see the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah, but indeed there is less. One
is not authorised to ascribe so solemn a character to the destruction of
Pompeii. '

The lake of Como moved him more profoundly. As he gazed upon the
overwhelming beauty around him, he thought of 'moral evil', and was
appalled by the contrast. 'May the sense of moral evil', he prayed, 'be
as strong in me as my delight in external beauty, for in a deep sense of
moral evil, more perhaps than in anything else, abides a saving
knowledge of God! '

His prayer was answered: Dr. Arnold was never in any danger of losing
his sense of moral evil. If the landscapes of Italy only served to
remind him of it, how could he forget it among the boys at Rugby School?
The daily sight of so many young creatures in the hands of the Evil One
filled him with agitated grief.

'When the spring and activity of youth,' he wrote, 'is altogether
unsanctified by anything pure and elevated in its desires, it becomes a
spectacle that is as dizzying and almost more morally distressing than
the shouts and gambols of a set of lunatics. '

One thing struck him as particularly strange: 'It is very startling,' he
said, 'to see so much of sin combined with so little of sorrow. ' The
naughtiest boys positively seemed to enjoy themselves most. There were
moments when he almost lost faith in his whole system of education, when
he began to doubt whether some far more radical reforms than any he had
attempted might not be necessary, before the multitude of children under
his charge--shouting and gambolling, and yet plunged all the while deep
in moral evil--could ever be transformed into a set of Christian
gentlemen. But then he remembered his general principles, the conduct of
Jehovah with the Chosen People, and the childhood of the human race. No,
it was for him to make himself, as one of his pupils afterwards
described him, in the words of Bacon, 'kin to God in spirit'; he would
rule the school majestically from on high. He would deliver a series of
sermons analysing 'the six vices' by which 'great schools were
corrupted, and changed from the likeness of God's temple to that of a
den of thieves'. He would exhort, he would denounce, he would sweep
through the corridors, he would turn the pages of Facciolati's Lexicon
more imposingly than ever; and the rest he would leave to the
Praepostors in the Sixth Form.

Upon the boys in the Sixth Form, indeed, a strange burden would seem to
have fallen. Dr. Arnold himself was very well aware of this. 'I cannot
deny,' he told them in a sermon, 'that you have an anxious duty--a duty
which some might suppose was too heavy for your years'; and every term
he pointed out to them, in a short address, the responsibilities of
their position, and impressed upon them 'the enormous influence' they
possessed 'for good or for evil'. Nevertheless most youths of seventeen,
in spite of the warnings of their elders, have a singular trick of
carrying moral burdens lightly. The Doctor might preach and look grave;
but young Brooke was ready enough to preside at a fight behind the
Chapel, though he was in the Sixth, and knew that fighting was against
the rules. At their best, it may be supposed that the Praepostors
administered a kind of barbaric justice; but they were not always at
their best, and the pages of "Tom Brown's Schooldays" show us what was
no doubt the normal condition of affairs under Dr. Arnold, when the boys
in the Sixth Form were weak or brutal, and the blackguard Flashman, in
the intervals of swigging brandy-punch with his boon companions, amused
himself by toasting fags before the fire.

But there was an exceptional kind of boy, upon whom the high-pitched
exhortations of Dr. Arnold produced a very different effect. A minority
of susceptible and serious youths fell completely under his sway,
responded like wax to the pressure of his influence, and moulded their
whole lives with passionate reverence upon the teaching of their adored
master. Conspicuous among these was Arthur Clough. Having been sent to
Rugby at the age of ten, he quickly entered into every phase of school
life, though, we are told, 'a weakness in his ankles prevented him from
taking a prominent part in the games of the place'. At the age of
sixteen, he was in the Sixth Form, and not merely a Praepostor, but head
of the School House. Never did Dr. Arnold have an apter pupil. This
earnest adolescent, with the weak ankles and the solemn face, lived
entirely with the highest ends in view. He thought of nothing but moral
good, moral evil, moral influence, and moral responsibility. Some of his
early letters have been preserved, and they reveal both the intensity
with which he felt the importance of his own position, and the strange
stress of spirit under which he laboured. 'I have been in one continued
state of excitement for at least the last three years,' he wrote when he
was not yet seventeen, 'and now comes the time of exhaustion. ' But he
did not allow himself to rest, and a few months later he was writing to
a schoolfellow as follows:

'I verily believe my whole being is soaked through with the wishing and
hoping and striving to do the school good, or rather to keep it up and
hinder it from falling in this, I do think, very critical time, so that
my cares and affections and conversations, thoughts, words, and deeds
look to that in voluntarily. I am afraid you will be inclined to think
this "cant" and I am conscious that even one's truest feelings, if very
frequently put out in the light, do make a bad and disagreeable
appearance; but this, however, is true, and even if I am carrying it too
far, I do not think it has made me really forgetful of my personal
friends, such as, in particular, Gell and Burbidge and Walrond, and
yourself, my dear Simpkinson. '

Perhaps it was not surprising that a young man brought up in such an
atmosphere, should have fallen a prey at Oxford, to the frenzies of
religious controversy; that he should have been driven almost out of his
wits by the ratiocinations of W. G. Ward; that he should have lost his
faith; that he should have spent the rest of his existence lamenting
that loss, both in prose and verse; and that he should have eventually
succumbed, conscientiously doing up brown paper parcels for Florence
Nightingale.

In the earlier years of his headmastership Dr. Arnold had to face a good
deal of opposition. His advanced religious views were disliked, and
there were many parents to whom his system of school government did not
commend itself. But in time this hostility melted away. Succeeding
generations of favourite pupils began to spread his fame through the
Universities. At Oxford especially, men were profoundly impressed by the
pious aims of the boys from Rugby. It was a new thing to see
undergraduates going to Chapel more often than they were obliged, and
visiting the good poor. Their reverent admiration for Dr. Arnold was no
less remarkable. Whenever two of his old pupils met, they joined in his
praises; and the sight of his picture had been known to call forth, from
one who had not even reached the Sixth, exclamations of rapture lasting
for ten minutes and filling with astonishment the young men from other
schools who happened to be present.

He became a celebrity; he became at last a great man. Rugby prospered;
its numbers rose higher than ever before; and, after thirteen years as
headmaster, Dr. Arnold began to feel that his work there was
accomplished, and that he might look forward either to other labours or,
perhaps, to a dignified retirement. But it was not to be.

His father had died suddenly at the age of fifty-three from angina
pectoris; and he himself was haunted by forebodings of an early death.
To be snatched away without a warning, to come in a moment from the
seductions of this World to the presence of Eternity--his most ordinary
actions, the most casual remarks, served to keep him in remembrance of
that dreadful possibility. When one of his little boys clapped his hands
at the thought of the approaching holidays, the Doctor gently checked
him, and repeated the story of his own early childhood; how his own
father had made him read aloud a sermon on the text 'Boast not thyself
of tomorrow"; and how, within the week, his father was dead. On the
title page of his MS. volume of sermons, he was always careful to write
the date of its commencement, leaving a blank for that of its
completion. One of his children asked him the meaning of this. 'It is
one of the most solemn things I do,' he replied, 'to write the beginning
of that sentence, and think that I may perhaps not live to finish it. '

It was noticed that in the spring of 1842 such thoughts seemed to be
even more frequently in his mind than usual. He was only in his
forty-seventh year, but he dwelt darkly on the fragility of human
existence. Towards the end of May, he began to keep a diary--a private
memorandum of his intimate communings with the Almighty. Here, evening
after evening, in the traditional language of religious devotion, he
humbled himself before God, prayed for strength and purity, and threw
himself upon the mercy of the Most High.

'Another day and another month succeed', he wrote on May 31st. 'May God
keep my mind and heart fixed on Him, and cleanse me from all sin. I
would wish to keep a watch over my tongue, as to vehement speaking and
censuring of others . . . I would desire to remember my latter end to which
I am approaching . . . May God keep me in the hour of death, through Jesus
Christ; and preserve me from every fear, as well as from presumption. '

On June 2nd he wrote, 'Again the day is over and I am going to rest. Oh
Lord, preserve me this night, and strengthen me to bear whatever Thou
shalt see fit to lay on me, whether pain, sickness, danger, or
distress. ' On Sunday, June 5th, the reading of the newspaper aroused
'painful and solemn' reflections . . . 'So much of sin and so much of
suffering in the world, as are there displayed, and no one seems able to
remedy either. And then the thought of my own private life, so full of
comforts, is very startling. ' He was puzzled; but he concluded with a
prayer: 'May I be kept humble and zealous, and may God give me grace to
labour in my generation for the good of my brethren and for His Glory! '

The end of the term was approaching, and to all appearance the Doctor
was in excellent spirits. On June 11th, after a hard day's work, he
spent the evening with a friend in the discussion of various topics upon
which he often touched in his conversation the comparison of the art of
medicine in barbarous and civilised ages, the philological importance of
provincial vocabularies, and the threatening prospect of the moral
condition of the United States. Left alone, he turned to his diary.

'The day after tomorrow,' he wrote, 'is my birthday, if I am permitted
to live to see it--my forty-seventh birthday since my birth. How large a
portion of my life on earth is already passed! And then--what is to
follow this life? How visibly my outward work seems contracting and
softening away into the gentler employments of old age. In one sense how
nearly can I now say, "Vivi". And I thank God that, as far as ambition
is concerned, it is, I trust, fully mortified; I have no desire other
than to step back from my present place in the world, and not to rise to
a higher. Still there are works which, with God's permission, I would do
before the night cometh. '

Dr. Arnold was thinking of his great work on Church and State.

Early next morning he awoke with a sharp pain in his chest. The pain
increasing, a physician was sent for; and in the meantime Mrs. Arnold
read aloud to her husband the Fifty-first Psalm. Upon one of their boys
coming into the room,

'My son, thank God for me,' said Dr. Arnold; and as the boy did not at
once catch his meaning, he added, 'Thank God, Tom, for giving me this
pain; I have suffered so little pain in my life that I feel it is very
good for me. Now God has given it to me, and I do so thank Him for it. '

Then Mrs. Arnold read from the Prayer-book the 'Visitation of the Sick',
her husband listening with deep attention, and assenting with an
emphatic 'Yes' at the end of many of the sentences.
When the physician
arrived, he perceived at once the gravity of the case: it was an attack
of angina pectoris. He began to prepare some laudanum, while Mrs. Arnold
went out to fetch the children. All at once, as the medical man was
bending over his glasses, there was a rattle from the bed; a convulsive
struggle followed; and, when the unhappy woman, with the children, and
all the servants, rushed into the room, Dr. Arnold had passed from his
perplexities forever.

There can be little doubt that what he had achieved justified the
prediction of the Provost of Oriel that he would 'change the face of
education all through the public schools of England'. It is true that,
so far as the actual machinery of education was concerned, Dr. Arnold
not only failed to effect a change, but deliberately adhered to the old
system. The monastic and literary conceptions of education, which had
their roots in the Middle Ages, and had been accepted and strengthened
at the revival of Learning, he adopted almost without hesitation. Under
him, the public school remained, in essentials, a conventional
establishment, devoted to the teaching of Greek and Latin grammar. Had
he set on foot reforms in these directions, it seems probable that he
might have succeeded in carrying the parents of England with him. The
moment was ripe; there was a general desire for educational changes; and
Dr. Arnold's great reputation could hardly have been resisted. As it
was, he threw the whole weight of his influence into the opposite scale,
and the ancient system became more firmly established than ever.

The changes which he did effect were of a very different nature. By
introducing morals and religion into his scheme of education, he altered
the whole atmosphere of public-school life. Henceforward the old
rough-and-tumble, which was typified by the regime of Keate at Eton,
became impossible. After Dr. Arnold, no public school could venture to
ignore the virtues of respectability. Again, by his introduction of the
prefectorial system, Dr. Arnold produced far-reaching effects--effects
which he himself, perhaps, would have found perplexing. In his day, when
the school hours were over, the boys were free to enjoy themselves as
they liked; to bathe, to fish, to ramble for long afternoons in the
country, collecting eggs or gathering flowers. 'The taste of the boys at
this period,' writes an old Rugbaean who had been under Arnold, 'leaned
strongly towards flowers'. The words have an odd look today. 'The modern
reader of "Tom Brown's Schooldays" searches in vain for any reference to
compulsory games, house colours, or cricket averages. In those days,
when boys played games they played them for pleasure; but in those days
the prefectorial system--the system which hands over the life of a
school to an oligarchy of a dozen youths of seventeen--was still in its
infancy, and had not yet borne its fruit.

Teachers and prophets have strange after-histories; and that of Dr.
Arnold has been no exception. The earnest enthusiast who strove to make
his pupils Christian gentlemen and who governed his school according to
the principles of the Old Testament, has proved to be the founder of the
worship of athletics and the worship of good form. Upon those two poles
our public schools have turned for so long that we have almost come to
believe that such is their essential nature, and that an English public
schoolboy who wears the wrong clothes and takes no interest in football,
is a contradiction in terms. Yet it was not so before Dr. Arnold; will
it always be so after him? We shall see.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dean Stanley. Life and Correspondence of Dr Arnold.
Thomas Hughes. Tom Brown's Schooldays.
Sir H. Maxwell-Lyte. History of Eton College.
Wilfrid Ward. W. G. Ward and the Oxford Movement.
H. Clough. Letters. An Old Rugbaean. Recollections of Rugby.
Thomas Arnold. Passages in a Wandering Life.




The End of General Gordon


DURING the year 1883 a solitary English gentleman was to be seen,
wandering, with a thick book under his arm, in the neighbourhood of
Jerusalem. His unassuming figure, short and slight, with its
half-gliding, half-tripping motion, gave him a boyish aspect, which
contrasted, oddly, but not unpleasantly, with the touch of grey on his
hair and whiskers. There was the same contrast--enigmatic and
attractive--between the sunburnt brick-red complexion--the hue of the
seasoned traveller--and the large blue eyes, with their look of almost
childish sincerity. To the friendly inquirer, he would explain, in a
row, soft, and very distinct voice, that he was engaged in elucidating
four questions--the site of the Crucifixion, the line of division
between the tribes of Benjamin and Judah, the identification of Gideon,
and the position of the Garden of Eden. He was also, he would add, most
anxious to discover the spot where the Ark first touched ground, after
the subsidence of the Flood: he believed, indeed, that he had solved
that problem, as a reference to some passages in the book which he was
carrying would show.

This singular person was General Gordon, and his book was the Holy
Bible.

In such complete retirement from the world and the ways of men, it might
have seemed that a life of inordinate activity had found at last a
longed-for, final peacefulness. For month after month, for an entire
year, the General lingered by the banks of the Jordan. But then the
enchantment was suddenly broken. Once more adventure claimed him; he
plunged into the whirl of high affairs; his fate was mingled with the
frenzies of Empire and the doom of peoples. And it was not in peace and
rest, but in ruin and horror, that he reached his end.

The circumstances of that tragic history, so famous, so bitterly
debated, so often and so controversially described, remain full of
suggestion for the curious examiner of the past. There emerges from
those obscure, unhappy records an interest, not merely political and
historical, but human and dramatic. One catches a vision of strange
characters, moved by mysterious impulses, interacting in queer
complication, and hurrying at last--so it almost seems--like creatures
in a puppet show to a predestined catastrophe. The characters, too, have
a charm of their own: they are curiously English. What other nation on
the face of the earth could have produced Mr. Gladstone and Sir Evelyn
Baring and Lord Hartington and General Gordon? Alike in their emphasis
and their lack of emphasis, in their eccentricity and their
conventionality, in their matter-of-factness and their romance, these
four figures seem to embody the mingling contradictions of the English
spirit. As for the mise-en-scene, it is perfectly appropriate. But
first, let us glance at the earlier adventures of the hero of the piece.

Charles George Gordon was born in 1833. His father, of Highland and
military descent, was himself a Lieutenant-General; his mother came of a
family of merchants, distinguished for their sea voyages into remote
regions of the Globe. As a boy, Charlie was remarkable for his high
spirits, pluck, and love of mischief. Destined for the Artillery, he was
sent to the Academy at Woolwich, where some other characteristics made
their appearance. On one occasion, when the cadets had been forbidden to
leave the dining-room and the senior corporal stood with outstretched
arms in the doorway to prevent their exit, Charlie Gordon put his head
down, and, butting the officer in the pit of the stomach, projected him
down a flight of stairs and through a glass door at the bottom. For this
act of insubordination he was nearly dismissed--while the captain of his
company predicted that he would never make an officer. A little later,
when he was eighteen, it came to the knowledge of the authorities that
bullying was rife at the Academy. The new-comers were questioned, and
one of them said that Charlie Gordon had hit him over the head with a
clothes-brush. He had worked well, and his record was on the whole a
good one; but the authorities took a serious view of the case, and held
back his commission for six months. It was owing to this delay that he
went into the Royal Engineers, instead of the Royal Artillery.

He was sent to Pembroke, to work at the erection of fortifications; and
at Pembroke those religious convictions, which never afterwards left
him, first gained a hold upon his mind. Under the influence of his
sister Augusta and of a 'very religious captain of the name of Drew', he
began to reflect upon his sins, look up texts, and hope for salvation.
Though he had never been confirmed--he never was confirmed--he took the
sacrament every Sunday; and he eagerly perused the Priceless Diamond,
Scott's Commentaries, and The Remains of the Rev. R. McCheyne. 'No
novels or worldly books,' he wrote to his sister, 'come up to the
Commentaries of Scott. . . . I, remember well when you used to get them in
numbers, and I used to laugh at them; but, thank God, it is different
with me now. I feel much happier and more contented than I used to do. I
did not like Pembroke, but now I would not wish for any prettier place.
I have got a horse and gig, and Drew and myself drive all about the
country. I hope my dear father and mother think of eternal things . . .
Dearest Augusta, pray for me, I beg of you. '

He was twenty-one; the Crimean War broke out; and before the year was
over, he had managed to get himself transferred to Balaclava. During the
siege of Sebastopol he behaved with conspicuous gallantry. Upon the
declaration of peace, he was sent to Bessarabia to assist in determining
the frontier between Russia and Turkey, in accordance with the Treaty of
Paris; and upon this duty he was occupied for nearly two years. Not long
after his return home, in 1860, war was declared upon China. Captain
Gordon was dispatched to the scene of operations, but the fighting was
over before he arrived. Nevertheless, he was to remain for the next four
years in China, where he was to lay the foundations of extraordinary
renown.

Though he was too late to take part in the capture of the Taku Forts, he
was in time to witness the destruction of the Summer Palace at
Peking--the act by which Lord Elgin, in the name of European
civilisation, took vengeance upon the barbarism of the East.

The war was over; but the British Army remained in the country, until
the payment of an indemnity by the Chinese Government was completed. A
camp was formed at Tientsin, and Gordon was occupied in setting up huts
for the troops. While he was thus engaged, he had a slight attack of
smallpox. 'I am glad to say,' he told his sister, 'that this disease has
brought me back to my Saviour, and I trust in future to be a better
Christian than I have been hitherto. '

Curiously enough a similar circumstance had, more than twenty years
earlier, brought about a singular succession of events which were now
upon the point of opening the way to Gordon's first great adventure. In
1837, a village schoolmaster near Canton had been attacked by illness;
and, as in the case of Gordon, illness had been followed by a religious
revulsion. Hong-Siu-Tsuen--for such was his name--saw visions, went into
ecstasies, and entered into relations with the Deity. Shortly
afterwards, he fell in with a Methodist missionary from America, who
instructed him in the Christian religion. The new doctrine, working upon
the mystical ferment already in Hong's mind, produced a remarkable
result. He was, he declared, the prophet of God; he was more--he was the
Son of God; he was Tien Wang, the Celestial King; he was the younger
brother of Jesus. The times were propitious, and proselytes soon
gathered around him. Having conceived a grudge against the Government,
owing to his failure in an examination, Hong gave a political turn to
his teaching, which soon developed into a propaganda of rebellion
against the rule of the Manchus and the Mandarins. The authorities took
fright, attempted to suppress Hong by force, and failed. The movement
spread. By 1850 the rebels were overrunning the populous and flourishing
delta of the Yangtse Kiang, and had become a formidable force. In 1853
they captured Nankin, which was henceforth their capital. The Tien Wang,
established himself in a splendid palace, and proclaimed his new
evangel. His theogony included the wife of God, or the celestial Mother,
the wife of Jesus, or the celestial daughter-in-law, and a sister of
Jesus, whom he married to one of his lieutenants, who thus became the
celestial son-in-law; the Holy Ghost, however, was eliminated.

His mission was to root out Demons and Manchus from the face of the
earth, and to establish Taiping, the reign of eternal peace. In the
meantime, retiring into the depths of his palace, he left the further
conduct of earthly operations to his lieutenants, upon whom he bestowed
the title of 'Wangs' (kings), while he himself, surrounded by thirty
wives and one hundred concubines, devoted his energies to the spiritual
side of his mission. The Taiping Rebellion, as it came to be called, had
now reached its furthest extent. The rebels were even able to occupy,
for more than a year, the semi-European city of Shanghai. But then the
tide turned. The latent forces of the Empire gradually asserted
themselves. The rebels lost ground, their armies were defeated, and in
1859 Nankin itself was besieged, and the Celestial King trembled in his
palace. The end seemed to be at hand, when there was a sudden twist of
Fortune's wheel. The war of 1860, the invasion of China by European
armies, their march into the interior, and their occupation of Peking,
not only saved the rebels from destruction, but allowed them to recover
the greater part of what they had lost. Once more they seized upon the
provinces of the delta, once more they menaced Shanghai. It was clear
that the Imperial army was incompetent, and the Shanghai merchants
determined to provide for their own safety as best they could. They
accordingly got together a body of troops, partly Chinese and partly
European, and under European officers, to which they entrusted the
defence of the town. This small force, which, after a few preliminary
successes, received from the Chinese Government the title of the 'Ever
Victorious Army', was able to hold the rebels at bay, but it could do no
more. For two years Shanghai was in constant danger. The Taipings,
steadily growing in power, were spreading destruction far and wide. The
Ever Victorious Army was the only force capable of opposing them, and
the Ever Victorious Army was defeated more often than not. Its first
European leader had been killed; his successor quarrelled with the
Chinese Governor, Li Hung Chang, and was dismissed. At last it was
determined to ask the General at the head of the British Army of
Occupation for the loan of an officer to command the force. The English,
who had been at first inclined to favour the Taipings, on religious
grounds, were now convinced, on practical grounds, of the necessity of
suppressing them. It was in these circumstances that, early in 1863, the
command of the Ever Victorious Army was offered to Gordon. He accepted
it, received the title of General from the Chinese authorities, and
entered forthwith upon his new task. He was just thirty.

In eighteen months, he told Li Hung Chang, the business would be
finished; and he was as good as his word. The difficulties before him
were very great. A vast tract of country was in the possession of the
rebels--an area, at the lowest estimate, of 14,000 square miles with a
population of 20,000,000. For centuries this low-lying plain of the
Yangtse delta, rich in silk and tea, fertilised by elaborate irrigation,
and covered with great walled cities, had been one of the most
flourishing districts in China. Though it was now being rapidly ruined
by the depredations of the Taipings, its strategic strength was
obviously enormous. Gordon, however, with the eye of a born general,
perceived that he could convert the very feature of the country which,
on the face of it, most favoured an army on the defence--its complicated
geographical system of interlacing roads and waterways, canals, lakes
and rivers--into a means of offensive warfare. The force at his disposal
was small, but it was mobile. He had a passion for map-making, and had
already, in his leisure hours, made a careful survey of the country
round Shanghai; he was thus able to execute a series of manoeuvres which
proved fatal to the enemy. By swift marches and counter-marches, by
sudden attacks and surprises, above all by the dispatch of armed
steamboats up the circuitous waterways into positions from which they
could fall upon the enemy in reverse, he was able gradually to force
back the rebels, to cut them off piecemeal in the field, and to seize
upon their cities. But, brilliant as these operations were, Gordon's
military genius showed itself no less unmistakably in other directions.
The Ever Victorious Army, recruited from the riff-raff of Shanghai, was
an ill-disciplined, ill-organised body of about three thousand men,
constantly on the verge of mutiny, supporting itself on plunder, and, at
the slightest provocation, melting into thin air. Gordon, by sheer force
of character, established over this incoherent mass of ruffians an
extraordinary ascendancy. He drilled them with rigid severity; he put
them into a uniform, armed them systematically, substituted pay for
loot, and was even able, at last, to introduce regulations of a sanitary
kind. There were some terrible scenes, in which the General, alone,
faced the whole furious army, and quelled it: scenes of rage, desperation,
towering courage, and summary execution. Eventually he attained an
almost magical prestige. Walking at the head of his troops with nothing
but a light cane in his hand, he seemed to pass through every danger
with the scatheless equanimity of a demi-god. The Taipings themselves
were awed into a strange reverence. More than once their leaders, in a
frenzy of fear and admiration, ordered the sharp-shooters not to take
aim at the advancing figure of the faintly smiling Englishman.

It is significant that Gordon found it easier to win battles and to
crush mutineers than to keep on good terms with the Chinese authorities.
He had to act in cooperation with a large native force; and it was only
natural that the general at the head of it should grow more and more
jealous and angry as the Englishman's successes revealed more and more
clearly his own incompetence. At first, indeed, Gordon could rely upon
the support of the Governor. Li Flung Chang's experience of Europeans
had been hitherto limited to low-class adventurers, and Gordon came as a
revelation.

'It is a direct blessing from Heaven,' he noted in his diary, 'the
coming of this British Gordon. . . . He is superior in manner and bearing
to any of the foreigners whom I have come into contact with, and does
not show outwardly that conceit which makes most of them repugnant in my
sight. '

A few months later, after he had accompanied Gordon on a victorious
expedition, the Mandarin's enthusiasm burst forth.

'What a sight for tired eyes,' he wrote, 'what an elixir for a heavy
heart--to see this splendid Englishman fight! . . . If there is anything
that I admire nearly as much as the superb scholarship of Tseng Kuofan,
it is the military qualities of this fine officer. He is a glorious
fellow! ' In his emotion, Li Hung Chang addressed Gordon as his brother,
declaring that he 'considered him worthy to fill the place of the
brother who is departed. Could I have said more in all the words of the
world? ' Then something happened which impressed and mystified the
sensitive Chinaman.

'The Englishman's face was first filled with a deep pleasure, and then
he seemed to be thinking of something depressing and sad; for the
smile went from his mouth and there were tears in his eyes when he
thanked me for what I had said. Can it be that he has, or has had, some
great trouble in his life, and that he fights recklessly to forget it,
or that Death has no terrors for him? '

But, as time went on, Li Hung Chang's attitude began to change. 'General
Gordon,' he notes in July, 'must control his tongue, even if he lets his
mind run loose. ' The Englishman had accused him of intriguing with the
Chinese general, and of withholding money due to the Ever Victorious
Army. 'Why does he not accord me the honours that are due to me, as head
of the military and civil authority in these parts? ' By September, the
Governor's earlier transports have been replaced by a more judicial
frame of mind.

'With his many faults, his pride, his temper, and his never-ending
demand for money, (for one is a noble man, and in spite of all I have
said to him or about him) I will ever think most highly of him. . . . He is
an honest man, but difficult to get on with. '

Disagreements of this kind might perhaps have been tided over until the
end of the campaign; but an unfortunate incident suddenly led to a more
serious quarrel. Gordon's advance had been fiercely contested, but it
had been constant; he had captured several important towns; and in
October he laid siege to the city of Soo-chow, once one of the most
famous and splendid in China. In December, its fall being obviously
imminent, the Taiping leaders agreed to surrender it on condition that
their lives were spared. Gordon was a party to the agreement, and laid
special stress upon his presence with the Imperial forces as a pledge of
its fulfilment. No sooner, however, was the city surrendered than the
rebel 'Wangs' were assassinated. In his fury, it is said that Gordon
searched everywhere for Li Hung Chang with a loaded pistol in his hand.
He was convinced of the complicity of the Governor, who, on his side,
denied that he was responsible for what had happened.